Name: Trump administration has 'no coherent objective' in Iran war: Former US colonel
Uploaded: 2026-03-22T23:02:25.000Z
Duration: 8 min 5 s
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Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson was chief of staff for former US Secretary of State Colin Colin Powell for 16 years.

He was a distinguished visiting professor of government and public policy at the College of William and Mary.

Adverbs of degree

And he joins us now live from just Outside of Washington, D.C.

colonel, it did seem at the beginning that Donald Trump expected a quick win here.

Well, coming off the high of what happened in Venezuela, certainly not got that.

Is the US And Israeli strategy in danger of unraveling?

Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper that I read, the only one that Bibi doesn't own, had a headline the other day that was very, very accurate.

Donald Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu need a spectacular victory to win.

They will not achieve that spectacular victory.

And in fact, now Hezbollah is showing a resilience and a resoluteness that Bibi underestimated also.

So he's got at least a two front war and arguably an even bigger war than that because he's got an appetite for other places like Syria as well as Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank.

But what about the strategy employed during this conflict?

Okay, but has that strategy been conflated with a, with its objective, which is, well, ephemeral at best?

I mean, we've had nine reasons from Donald Trump for starting this war.

And if you give me a good one, I might assume it is the objective because I have heard nothing from my military, nothing from the State Department, and

certainly nothing from the White House that even resembles a coherent objective, let alone a achievable objective.

What I've heard is everything from this will be a short war, this will be a long war, this will be a ground force war, this will be an air war, this will be a missile war.

I don't think they know what they're doing, frankly.

And that is very disturbing for a man like me who spent 31 years in the American military and most of the time knew what we were doing.

I don't see anyone in this group that looks like they know what they're doing.

So certainly not the secretary of Defense War Hegseth, and certainly not the president.

And I might as well throw the national security adviser slash secretary of state in there.

They don't seem to know what they're doing and they're not using the statutory decision making process, as Tulsi Gabbard indicated vividly to Congress, even though she also indicated a total ignorance of that process.

We don't actually even know what's actually happening within Israel, whether the ballistic missiles that Iran has fired and they're getting better in terms of the quality of them as ordnance is depleted in Iron Dome and other defense systems.

Well, they're putting Rom Shahs in there now, Mach 3, Mach 4 missiles, many of which have, I don't call them cluster warheads, I call them mirved warheads like our nuclear missiles.

That is to say they're, they're much better than cluster bombs or cluster warheads.

And I've seen video, I've seen live video smuggled out to be sure, because Israel has cracked down on it majorly.

And I have seen the damage done to Haifa and the oil facilities there and the port there.

I've seen the damage done internally to Tel Aviv.

I've seen people die on the street running between bomb shelters.

So the devastation being wreaked on Israel despite their blockade of any information getting out is leaking out.

How do you think that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is viewing all this now?

I think he's probably getting somewhat desperate and I recall to my mind sadly enough, gravely enough, what he said in Hebrew to his entourage of like minded people about four or five days ago in a bunker which was.

They will get a big surprise if this keeps up.

Words to that effect in Hebrew, they aren't, they essentially were translated for me as they cannot imagine what I'm going to do to them.

Well, there's only one way as a military professional.

I interpret that as he's going to use a nuclear weapon.

Well, that would be one thing which they had countenanced before in the 1973 war with Golda Meier.

Here I'm very concerned as a military professional who knows something about nuclear warfare.

I was a prefix 5 officer, for example, which means I knew about nuclear weapons.

If you really wanted to damage Iran in a significant way that might bring them to the table to surrender, you wouldn't use one.

Because Iran is a country as big as Western Europe.

It has some incredibly daunting terrain in the Zagros Mountains, in the dashtokivir Desert.

they are small, are not going to do that much damage unless you mass them and you mass them on key underground targets.

So I don't think this is going to be a single use of a nuclear weapon.

If he does do it, it's going to be multiple weapons.

But he'd also break the nuclear taboo, but not nearly.

Of course, that would be the worst kind of outcome here.

But a second worst outcome possibly would be the US and Israel putting boots on the ground.

I've seen the so called plan for using the Marine Expeditionary Units that are now making their way toward Khar Island a long way away right now, one carrier and grouper in the Red Sea and I think the others up in the Mediterranean still.

So if they do it, they're going to have to do it with Ospreys, they're going to have to do it with aircraft, in other words, and

they're going to have to stage out of Kuwait or some other similar place close by because the range of an Osprey is only about 400 miles.

So if they're going to do this, it's going to be extremely dangerous.

And I fear that's what they're thinking about, the precision of Venezuela.

They can implement that in the Persian Gulf.

I planned for warfare in the Persian Gulf for four years at the Pacific Command when we were the command responsible for it.

None of Iran is easy territory, not even Kharga island, the Forbidden island as it's called.

But I think it's a little bit too far to think that we can take it and not get enormous casualty count out of that.

Where will this conflict in your view with what you've said, leave America, Colonel, and

I think the Arab countries in particular, but all the countries, including Egypt, and

I don't consider them an Arab country, have learned that the security agreement of the United States is a false one, that they have been attacked and attacked and attacked and that they might be attacked even further and in a more deadly way.

And so they're going to be looking for new big daddies, if you will, and

the big daddies are right there waiting for them.

Colonel, thank you so much for your time.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, the former Chief of Staff, US Secretary of State Colin Powell.

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Trump administration has 'no coherent objective' in Iran war: Former US colonel

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